Tuesday 31 May 2011

Is magic real?

Prompted by an interesting conversation last night, the question, as the title suggests was is magic real? and if so, can magic have an effect external to the magician, or is any effect only internal? In order to address these questions it may be useful to first consider what magic might be. We are not talking here about stage magic, the mis-direction and sleight of hand conjuring tricks of the entertainer, but about classical magic. As Aleister Crowley proposed, changing the world by application of the force of will of the magician, altering reality to suit the purpose of the individual or group working magic. This gives us a start point in terms of definition. Magic is an act of will specifically to effect a change. There are alternatives. If we look back to Flamel, Dee, Nostradamus and the alchemists we see magic specifically used for two distinct purposes, firstly the transmutation of base metal to gold, and secondly for prognostication. Personally I believe that the current idea that alchemical research used the transmutation as an analogy for the transmutation of humanity to a higher state of development is at best only a tangetial aim. The aim as stated at the time was purely commercial in application. Similarly, the idea of prognostication was to create a commercial advantage for the person paying for the work. So here we see magic used specifically for a commercial and practical purpose.

These are just two examples of thoughts on what magic is, but there are others. So, from these it appears that historically magic has been presented as a practical art, specifically real, and with a real world application, more a tool perhaps than anything particularly mystical. The same can be suggested for the use of magic by folk healers. The image of the cunning man or woman in rural societies using magic to heal and in some cases harm.

In both of these cases it is possible to argue that there is no fundamental need for magic to actually work in a practical sense. This may sound counter intuitive, but I will attempt to explain. There is a phenomena known in modern medical practice called the placebo effect. It is possible to achieve a real and significant effect in terms of improving a patients health by convincing the patient that they are taking a real medicine when in fact they are taking a non-active substitute. The full mechanism for the effect is not completely understood but the inference is that the human body is quite good at healing itself, given the right conditions, and more importantly the right mental conditions. In a similar way, it is possible to suggest that the effects of magic may be real and significant whilst magic itself may be a mental creation. A question for another day perhaps is whether this matters.

So, to return to the original question, I would argue that the effects of magic can be real and measured in the right circumstances, but whether magic itself is real is much more difficult to argue. Of course, this does leave another additional question, since placebos have been shown not to work if the patient knows they are receiving a placebo. If magic is only real in effect, but that effect relies on a belief in magic, would questioning that belief reduce or even remove the effect?

Friday 27 May 2011

Music for the jilted generation?

I used to talk to my grandparents a lot when they were still around, and in all those conversations about their lives and experiences I can't remember a single time when they expressed the feeling of being hard done by. They had all been reasonably successful and productive, two teachers, one a headteacher, a senior policeman and a housewife, but all had been through two World wars, all had come from working class backgrounds, two had come from fairly tough rural families, one from an industrial clothmaking family, all working from the age of about 10 or 11 in pretty touch conditions. They had had friends die in childhood, friends lost in the wars, all in all they were probably due one or two moans and whinges.

Compare this to my own generation, and bear in mind I fully count myself in this assessment. A quick survey of my peers finds a general feeling of dis-satisfaction with life. This in spite of the majority of my peers being university educated, generally employed, certainly owning more stuff than any of my grandparents, being more mobile in terms of transport options, generally having better health, certainly better healthcare, a better and wider choice of food, more leisure time and more activities to be involved in in that time, and overall, a better standard of living.

The Prodigy, a band that I am quite fond of, produced an album in the early 1990"s from which the title of this blog is taken, and it really does seem to sum up this difficult to grasp phenomenon. There seems to be a feeling that my generation, and the generations subsequent feel that they are missing out but can't quantify what they are missing out on. I suffer from this myself and I just can't explain it adequately, which is odd because I tend to pride myself on being deeply self aware and having strong self knowledge. I feel as though life owes me a living but I have no justification for this feeling, it just doesn't make sense. I can almost see happiness just ahead of me, and I am sure that at some point it will all amke sense and I will achieve it. I study happiness as a concept, and the lives of those people who seem to have found contentment, but is that part of the problem? Is my worrying about happiness a block to achieving it?

One day it will all make sense....

Thursday 26 May 2011

Prognostication the right way

There have been many great prognosticators through the ages, and indeed there still are, but these days they tend to call themselves futurologists, and rather than gazing into crystal balls or into the heavens they tend to gaze into computer screens, but is the result any clearer? Mankind is by nature a worrying species. Part of our self awareness is the awareness that we are individually finite. With this awareness comes thoughts about the way we, as individuals, will reach our end, and from that, where we as a species will reach our end. From the earliest records it appears that we have been fascinated by the future. The Sumerian Gods, the Annunaki, came to Earth and gave man knowledge of the future and how to develop. The Egyptian Gods, particularly Thoth granted wisdom and knowledge including knowledge of the movement of the stars and the future destiny of the Pharoahs. The Greeks consulted the Sybils, most famously the Oracle at Delphi for predictions of the outcomes of battles.

Throughout the ages, men and women have attempted to gain glimpses of the future through a vast range of methods. From John Dee, Nostradamus, through Mother Shipton to Edgar Cayce, using angelic voices, astrology, scrying mirrors, trance states, Kabbalah and many more techniques. Some scholars of prognosticators have suggested that what a lot of these prophets are doing is taking existing knowledge and extrapolating it forward. Particularly in the field of astrology, the theory is that history is cyclical, as are the paths of the heavenly bodies being studied, so by understanding the position of those bodies and how they have related to events on Earth it is possible to predict forward what is going to happen the next time those same heavenly alignments occur.

Of course, since the enlightenment in Europe, and the formalisation of theories of the physical work by Gallileo, Newton, Copernicus and the long list of physical scientists and thinkers the idea of cause and effect has been refined and we now understand that there are a vast array of complex interactions both understood and not yet understood that have a significant impact on future events. This hasn't meant an end to prediction, on the contrary, this has led to an increase in the desire to plan for the future, particularly for big companies interested in predicting future trends and fashions, future demand, changes in political ideology and the like. In theory at least, the vast amount of information available to the modern prognosticator is, to all intents and purposes limitless. Forget the library of Alexandria as the repository of all human knowledge, we have the internet. Research papers, companies data, government decisions, even supposedly secret information is available for analysis.

The question is, does the availability of all this data make prognostication any easier? Complexity theory would suggest otherwise, but there is an arguement that complexity theory is a function of not fully understanding the underlying principles, assuming there are some, of the physical world. So, currently we can make predictions based on a great deal of information. Some success has been had in the field of financial prediction, although some key market fluctuations have been missed. The wealth of data available it now at a level where predictions can become more accurate. The next step is to understand the algorythms required to perform the analysis and the probabilities involved.

How far are we from truly accurate predictions? Now that would be telling.....

The joy of text.....

I love reading. It is one of my favourite pastimes. I don't mind too much whether it is in book form, magazine online, whatever, I just love reading. fiction, non-fiction, novels to academic papers, blogs to journals. Good writing is a wonderful medium of communication. I know there is a saying that a picture paints a thousand words, but the visual artist has no control over which 1000 words the observer will take away from the artwork. I guess to an extent the same is true of thewritten word in that it is perfectly possible for two people to read the same text and take away completely different understandings of the meaning of the text. One only has to look at the disagreements prevalent in pretty much every major religion over the interpretation of religious texts to see this, but how much more interpretation and consequently dispute would there be if we still used a pictorial represntation system of writing?

I find it very hard to imagine a society in which reading is not a significant part. I clearly remember being very confused by the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a distopian view of a future in which books have been banned and all information is disseminated by video screen instead. In the book there is a suggestion that the world will be saved by small groups of people learning books verbatim ready to recreate them once society was re-established. This theme is comon in several traditions. In Islam the idea of the Hafiz has similar themes, as does the creation of early books in Western Europe taking stories with a long history in an oral tradition and writing them down. In the European tradition this was an interesting event since the people who wrote the stories down were predominantly early Christians, and the peoples whos stories were being written down were not. This has led to much interesting debate around how these stories might have been changed in the writing.

But that is perhaps a post for another day...

Awakening creative thinking

Part of the reason for this blog is the theory of mind that suggests that the more creativity you can build into your thinking, the easier creativity becomes. The research for this comes from the development of FMRI scanning technology where magnetic resonance imaging is used to scan brain function whilst the brain is activated. Using this technology in research into the effect of learning to play a musical instrument it has been found that the process of learning an instrument creates nw neural pathways in the brain, specifically between the left and right hemispheres. This cross hemisphere linking is thought to give enhanced creative and problem solving ability. The research went a stage further and discovered that the process of neural pathway creation was found when people who couldn't play an instrument acted as though they could, pretending to play drums or guitar.

One of the interesting points to come out of this research is that once the neural pathways are created, they tend to remain in place, even if practice is not continued. It leads to interesting thoughts about the current crop of counselling therapies that follow the talking style of counselling such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). There has been very little qualitative evidence for these therapies being successful, but the idea behind them is that they use techniques that create new neural pathways in the brain to change the way people think. It is clear that the creation of new neural pathways is possible, and that by creating those pathways it is possible to change the way in which one "thinks" and so improve cognitive ability.

My aim, by giving myself more space to be creative, is to become more creative. A self fulfilling prophecy if you wish, in an "if you build it he will come" way. It may work, it may not, but I am determined to enjoy the journey to find out....

Wednesday 25 May 2011

Some things I like....

I guess I should probably start with giving you, dear readers a little bit more of an insight into the sort of things I enjoy. We can come on to things I don't later.... I'm a bit of a techie geek, and I really enjoy looking at the way new gadgets work, and how they use new technology. I like the internet, because it has lots of cool stuff to read and learn about. I like science and maths (see, told you I was a geek) and I like trying to understand how and why things work - that includes life by the way :-)

I like to read other peoples blogs, and I find it helps me to understand how people work, something that I am not great at, and sometimes I read something that I really enjoy, or that makes me think and perhaps do a little research, and that is nice too. Part of the reason for this blog is to have somewhere to keep links to other peoples thoughts, so that I can organise them in my head, and I can track them back to the people who thought them. The first one that comes to mind is about search engine optimisation. I like search engines, they are useful tools for finding things, and they have cool mathematics behind them in the form of algorythms that power the search.

It seems to me that as the internet gets more and more cluttered that ability of search engines to find relevant content becomes increasingly important, and well designed websites with good quality information deserve to be ranked higher. This blog post SEO rantings of a chat room reject is by an SEO specialist that I kinda get in that she thinks about optimising websites based on quality rather than anything else, and seems to get the technical background to understanding the way search engines work. I like that, so I'm following her blog with interest....

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Introductions and explanations...

The first post of a new blog really has to start with a brief introduction. Over the years I have got used to introducing myself, generally along the lines of sitting around a table with a bunch of other people and having to go through the round table "lets all tell each other about ourselves" schtick. You may already be wondering why this is, and indeed what relevance it has. Well, all is about to be revealed.....

You may have guessed already, but just in case, the box in question is the one that people talk about thinking outside of...you know the one. "Come on guys lets think outside the box on this one!" If you have ever spent time around someone with dyslexia, you will almost certainly be familiar with the attitude espoused by this blog, to whit "What box?" generally accompanied by a look of bewilderment. This is not a response limited to dyslexics. It tends to happen with people with Aspergers syndrome as well, which is kinda sorta where I come in....

So, what is this blog all about? Well, it's been a bit of a long process reaching this point, but the short version is that I have a creative mind, and limited outlets for that creativity, so I thought to myself, why not create a blog, somewhere I can put things I like, and talk about things I don't and see what happens. It seems like a good idea to me anyway, so brace yourself interwebland, I hope you are ready.....